


Sunshine Golden, Maize and Dream

by minijhi



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: M/M, Soulmate AU, colour soulmate au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-16
Updated: 2015-05-16
Packaged: 2018-03-30 18:59:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3948031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minijhi/pseuds/minijhi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are certain colours that Kuroo cannot see, and some that Kenma can’t either.  It’s strange, having found your soulmate but still seeing the world like a children’s colouring book, pages only half-filled in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sunshine Golden, Maize and Dream

**Author's Note:**

> I was going through one of my five million word documents the other day and I found this really strange list of AUs, among them the IKEA AU, Broadway AU and Jurassic Park AU (???). Anyway, on that list was the Colour Soulmate AU, and I've definitely been meaning to write a soulmate AU for a really long time. Guess what else I've been meaning to write for awhile now?
> 
> More Kurotsukkiken/ kurokentsukki :)
> 
> So! I don't know if this has been done but a polyship colour soulmate AU ie. the world is black and white until you meet your soulmate, and in this case, meeting only one of them leaves the world still half black-and-white.

Kuroo has seen the colours for a very long time.

He is seven-going-on-eight when he meets Kozume Kenma, and the moment his eyes lock onto the other boy’s, the whole world instantly seems lighter, and there’s a vivid rush of _something odd_ going on with everything around him.  Right before his eyes, Kuroo sees the boy’s entire figure spark to life with what must be the thing the adults call colour, and Kuroo’s eyes go wide.

“Wow.”  Kuroo says, stunned.  He looks around at the new colours, at the dusty pavement beneath his feet and the bushes, and gasps when he looks up at the sky, soft and fluffy and magnificent in a way black and white had never looked.  When he looks back at his new companion though, he finds that the boy has folded himself into a tiny ball on the bench, arms tucked tightly around his knees.

Kuroo frowns.  He carefully climbs up onto the bench beside the tiny stranger. The boy turns to stare at him, wide-eyed, and Kuroo’s mouth falls open slightly.  His eyes are so pretty.

“Do you see that?  Did you make me see that?”  Kuroo asks softly, so he won’t scare the boy.

After a long pause, he receives a tiny nod in reply.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”  Kuroo asks.

An even longer pause, and another nod. His soulmate is quiet, but Kuroo smiles anyway, pleased and excited. 

“I’m going to love you lots and lots.” Kuroo tells the younger boy earnestly, with all the conviction of someone who spent a childhood growing up with fairytales about colours and soulmates and forevers.  “I promise.”  Kuroo says.

And so Kuroo, seven-going-on-eight, promises his forever to a little boy whose name he does not know, in the middle of a park on a random Thursday afternoon.  However, he doesn’t doubt himself the least, because he knows, because the colours have told him so, that this boy is worth it.

 

-

 

He sits with Kenma on the park bench for a long time, whispering to Kenma what he knows about the colours and trying to name them, before Kenma’s parents come to pick him up.  Kenma doesn’t say anything about the colours, so Kuroo doesn’t either, but presses a tiny kiss into Kenma’s hair and tells Kenma he will come back to wait at this bench again tomorrow morning.  Kenma nods, still silent, and his parents whisk him away.

On the way home, Kuroo stares at everything, coming to an abrupt, breathless stop when he reaches the end of the park and finds a flower garden.  It’s incredible, all these things, and even though his house in only five minutes away, Kuroo doesn’t reach his front door until a whole hour later, and by then he has an armful of flowers he’d picked, and his pockets are filled with things like bits of stone and metal and other discarded things lying on the sidewalk.

In the house, he drops the flowers on the dining room table and finds himself enraptured by everything else.  There are all these colours he cannot name, he knows the sofa is supposed to be blue, so that must be what blue looks like, and that the carpet is red, but it doesn’t look very different from it normally does. The wallpaper is this strange, faded almost-colour, and Kuroo runs up to his room to look at all his toys.

He pulls every last one of them out, seeing them in a completely different light, rolls around his wonderfully exciting blankets and stares at himself in the mirror for a very long time.

And then he hears the sound of the front door opening.

“Mom!”  Kuroo shouts, sprinting out of his room and nearly colliding with the staircase. “Dad!”

His parents are still taking off their shoes at the front door when Kuroo reaches them, throwing his arms around his father, then his mother.  They look so different, but they are still the same people, and they hug him back, bewildered. Kuroo scatters back to the dining table, grabbing the flowers and giving them to his mom.

“I got these for you!”  he says.  “Aren’t they wonderful?  I picked so many of them, and there are all these things— what colour is this, mom? And this?  And your dress, and the sofa, and the wallpaper, look at everything!”

His parents freeze simultaneously, but their expressions are soon turning into one of joy and disbelief. 

“Can you see the colours, Tetsurou?” his father asks. 

Kuroo nods eagerly, his hair flying up and down. “I met my soulmate in the park! His name is Kenma.” Kuroo says.  “He’s beautiful.  His eyes are like…”  Kuroo scans the house for the colour, and then notices the necklace around his mother’s neck, reaching out to touch it.  “…what colour is your necklace, mom?  

“Tetsurou!”  His mother says, her eyes filling with happy tears.  She lifts Kuroo up in an enormous hug, swinging him around the living room.

“Atta boy.”  His father says proudly, and Kuroo smiles so, so bright.

 

-

 

Over the course of the next few days, Kuroo’s mother buys him a stack of books containing full-page coloured illustrations, many of them with tiny labels of the colour names written over each hue. Kuroo drags Kenma over to his house and spends hours pointing out the colours to Kenma, rolling the names around his tongue in like a precious new candy, names like Alizarin Crimson, Fuschia, Tuscan Red and Champagne.

“Why are there so many names?”  Kenma mumbles, looking down at a page that has about twenty different shades of red and the names to go with them. “It’s troublesome.”

Kuroo touches a painted flower delicately. The pinks are the brightest and Kuroo likes them immensely, Carmines and Cerise and Cotton Candy. None of the books, however, are perfect— every few pages or so Kuroo comes across an illustration that is still half black-and-white, and wonders why the artists never bothered to finish them. 

He’s looking at an underwater scene with multi-coloured fish and corals and stumbling over the pronunciation of several names when he frowns.  Half of these colours are basically shades of grey— names like Brilliant Azure and Navy Blue and Turqoise.  It’s disappointing, because with names like that Kuroo would have hoped for something more exciting.

He says this much to Kenma.

“Huh?”  Kenma says.

Kuroo points at the Turqoise pebbles on the ocean floor.  They look ugly and unfinished next to the black-and-orange clownfishes, the striking Candy Apple red of the octopus.  Even the water has terrible streaks of dark grey in it, and Kuroo wonders if maybe the ocean is black-and-white.  He hasn’t had the chance yet to see the real thing.

“It’s blue.”  Kenma says.  “Like the sky, but a bit darker.” 

“What are you looking at?”  Kuroo says. 

“What are you?”

 

-

 

After another twenty minutes, Kuroo and Kenma realize that they aren’t seeing the colours in their full spectrum. There are certain colours that Kenma can see that Kuroo cannot, and vice versa.  Kuroo sees shades of purple and blues in mostly black and white, and Kenma, Kuroo comes to realize, still thinks his eyes are a pale grey. 

Kuroo grabs Kenma’s hand and runs downstairs, now surveying every black-and-white object with trepidation, frightened by the possibility that they might have colours on them that Kuroo cannot see.

His mother is reading the newspaper at the dining table.

“Maybe you don’t see them yet.”  His mother says, after some consideration. “It’s uncommon, but I think my friend’s niece had the same problem.  She and her soulmate gradually came to see all the colours together. Give it a couple of years.”

 

-

 

Time passes. 

They don’t grow to see the missing colours, not a single one more.  As his classmates slowly start seeing the colours too, Kuroo finds himself obsessively worrying about the missing colours, feeling like something has gone terribly wrong in the grand scheme of things.

He loves Kenma so much that he can’t imagine for a second that Kenma might not be his true soulmate, but he can’t stop wondering why, _why, why_ —

On the train ride home one day, Kenma is more quiet than usual, eyes trained onto his handheld game.  Being able to see colour has allowed Kenma to access a whole collection of games built around colour schemes and combinations, and even though there are still certain colours he cannot see, between the both of them they have the games pinned. 

Kuroo watches Kenma play.  If there is a colour Kenma cannot see, he’ll turn to Kuroo for help, and Kuroo will reach over, filling the gaps in Kenma’s vision with the sight in his own.  In a way it is beautiful too, two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, an incomplete picture without the other.

Kenma swipes at a line of bubbles, matching a light green with a disgusting shade of orange.  The streak he is building abruptly ends and Kenma hits the reset button almost viciously.

“Kenma?”  Kuroo asks quietly.  Kenma flicks at the bubbles again, one streak, two streak before once more, it is game over.

“There were some girls in class today talking.” Kenma says, eyes downcast, hands gripping his game tightly.  “They said that sometimes, if you didn’t see all the colours, it meant you weren’t perfect for each other.”

“I’m sorry,”  Kenma continues softly, “That I’m not good enough. I’ll try harder, I—” 

Something inside Kuroo snaps.  He seizes Kenma in a tight hug, his throat dry and hot, wishing more than anything that this wasn’t happening to them, wanting nothing more than for the boy in his arms to be happy and loved and _certain_. 

“Don’t.  You’re more than good enough for me.”  Kuroo whispers, hands clenched into fists, furious with love. “I’d give up any colour for you, any day.”

 

-

 

In the sweltering heat of summer one year, there’s a trend of girls dyeing their hair different colours even though half of them can’t even see the colours, and it results in a very amusing parade of girls with streaks in their hair of greens and pinks and blues.

One of the girls in his class comes to school one day with her hair bleached a beautiful shade of white-gold, and Kuroo sits up abruptly, nearly knocking his desk over.  He has a brilliant idea.

 

-

 

“Why?”  Kenma says, frowning.  He tugs at the ends of his hair uncertainly.

“It’ll look really nice, I promise!” Kuroo says.  He’s holding a bottle of bleach in his hands, one he’d picked up from the convenience store on his way home from class, and had been trying to convince Kenma to let him bleach his hair since.

“It looks grey to me.”  Kenma says, eyeing the bottle with suspicion.

“It’s not grey.”  Kuroo corrects again, patiently.  “It’s yellow— blond, rather.”

“Yellow?”  Kenma asks.  “You want to dye my hair the colour of the sun?” 

The younger boy looks alarmed, because even though he has never seen the actual colour of the sun (which isn’t quite yellow anyway), he’s aware that the sun is bright, and bright definitely means more attention on him. 

“It’s not the colour of the sun.”  Kuroo says, subtly shifting his thumb over the label of the bottle that reads _Sunshine Golden_. “Maybe it’s more like… apples, the inside of apples, apple pie?”

Kenma gives him a look that says ‘what are you even talking about’ and ‘you really want to turn my hair the colour of apple pie?’

Kuroo grins sheepishly.  He runs his fingers through the silky, black locks of hair and shoots Kenma the most pitiful, pleading look he can muster. “Please, Kenma? Please?”

Kenma sighs.

 

-

 

Kuroo’s hanging out with some classmates when he receives a phone call from Kenma.  He answers, surprised but pleased, excusing himself from the table of the fast-food joint to go somewhere quieter. 

“Hey Kenma, what’s up?”

“Kuro.”  Kenma says in a half-sob.  Kuroo freezes, grip tightening on the phone.

“What’s wrong?  Kenma?  Where are you?”

“I’m at the mall.  There was this boy in the game store—”  Kenma says in a shaky voice.  Kuroo bites down on his lower lip, hard.

“What did he do?”  Kuroo asks, expecting the worst.  “Are you okay?  Kenma?”

“He—”  Kenma takes another, shuddering breath.  “He made me see the rest of the colours.”

 

-

 

Kuroo bursts into the mall pavilion twenty minutes later, instantly spotting Kenma on an empty park bench, trembling from head-to-toe.  Kuroo calls his name, so Kenma knows he’s approaching, and wraps the boy in a hug, pressing gentle kisses all over the golden hair.

Kenma buries his face in Kuroo’s shirt, his heart still pounding loudly and Kuroo waits for him to calm down, murmuring assurances in a soothing voice.

It takes a long time for Kenma to calm down, and Kuroo presses his chin on the boy’s head, taking long, regular breaths, letting Kenma feel the steady rise and fall of his chest.

“I don’t know where he went.”  Kenma says slowly, when he finally looks up. “I was so afraid. I ran away.  I’m sorry, Kuro.” 

Kuroo shakes his head.  “It’s okay.”  He says, meaning it.  They found him once, they’ll find him again.

Kuroo doesn't know how he feels about it, the fact that there is another boy out there who holds the rest of his colours in his soul, that someone out there is supposed to _belong_ with him the same way Kenma belongs.

“It’s uncommon,”  his father says later, “But not unheard of.  Give it time.”

His mother says proudly: “My little boy has such a big heart.”  

“You’re lucky.”  His father agrees.  “To have so much love, and to be so loved in return.”

It’s terrifying, but that is that.  Kuroo isn’t weird or incomplete or _not enough_ , nothing like that at all.

Kuroo is lucky.  Kenma is lucky too.

And the new boy, somewhere out there, when they finally find him, will be just as lucky, just as loved.

 

-

 

They return to the game store the next day, asking the shopkeeper if she recognized the boy from yesterday, but the woman shakes her head, saying she’d never seen that boy in her shop before. They go back again anyway, every week or so, but the mysterious, colour-bright boy never returns.

 

-

 

“Kuroo.”  Kenma says, when he sees himself in the mirror for the first time. “What the hell did you do to my hair?”

 

-

 

There’s a volleyball match in Kuroo’s third-year of high school with a team in Miyagi called Karasuno. 

“I’m looking forward to it.”  Kenma says, at night when they are about to go to sleep, and Yamamoto is howling at the moon about female managers and the injustice of life.

The next day, they line up face-to-face with Karasuno, and like Kenma, Kuroo feels good about today too, somehow.  He lets his grin show on his face as he looks down the line at the rest of the players and abruptly freezes, colour bleeding into his vision as he meets a pair of amber eyes, a little less striking than Kenma’s, but no less beautiful.  The boy’s eyes widen beneath his glasses as he meets Kuroo’s gaze, face flushing a lovely pink, hair the colour of cornfields at the end of summer.

Kuroo’s heart leaps.  That is the boy.  They’ve found the boy.  He tilts his head back, looking up at the sky and startlingly sees that the stripes of black and grey are gone, filled in with all the colours Kuroo could never see before.  Kuroo takes in a sharp exhale, finding relief bubbling through him in an unstoppable flood.

He feels like he’s having a sort of religious epiphany, seeing God’s work in its full glory for the first time. It’s dizzying but wonderful, and Kuroo just laughs and laughs, shoulders shaking with the effort

The rest of his team eyes him nervously, wondering if their captain, after so many days of borderline insanity, has finally given in to the madness. 

“No, Yaku—”  Kuroo chokes out, still grinning, when the boy tries to get him to calm down and bow like a proper captain in front of their lifelong rivals, not a lunatic of a man.  “Yaku, everything’s great.”

He grabs the captain of Karasuno’s hand, shaking it because he is glad to be here, so glad, and turns his gaze back to his soulmate, his _other_ soulmate, his and Kenma’s soulmate. The boy looks away quickly, blinking as he tries to adapt his eyes to the new onslaught of colours. Kuroo breathes in the spring air, sweet and fresh. 

“I’m going to love you lots and lots.” Kuroo calls down the line.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> ahh why can't soulmate AUs exist in real life.
> 
> thanks for reading! I'd love to hear from you : ) <3


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